Keeping it Real in a Frantic World
Fabulous Findhorn friend, Ruby Wax, and Gelong Thubten, and Rahla Xenopoulos welcome you to build resilience on this 5-night retreat at Avalon Wellbeing Centre.
Fabulous friend of Findhorn, Ruby Wax, along with Gelong Thubten and Rahla Xenopoulos are offering this 5-night retreat in the stunning setting of Avalon Wellbeing Centre in Skipton, North Yorkshire. Join them on this retreat of building resilience, finding refuge within, navigating the unknown, and embracing the full spectrum of human experience.
Find out more and book your place here.
A message from Ruby Wax
We are offering this retreat because they know that when we feel connected to our bodies and minds, it’s as if we’ve found home.
And when we find home, things like uncertainty and loneliness don’t pack the same punch.
The outside world may be in chaos, but if we know we’ve always got the house of ‘us’ to come back to, we will always have a refuge.
The aim of this retreat is to help you find that refuge, or at least help you build one.
To do that, we have to be fearless, bring dark realities out into the light and accept them. This takes courage and effort, and most people would rather just ‘have a nice day.
But we’ve seen what happens when the days stop being so nice. We know we need some kind of safety net so the fall doesn’t kill us.
None of us want to face the unfaceable, but there has to be a baptism of fire if we’re to come out the other end – wise, not broken.
We offer this retreat as a guide to help bulk up our emotional resilience as far as learning to deal with the unknown.
So that when the waves of living feel unswimmable, and we feel we’re going under, there are enough life jackets to go round.
During the retreat, we will offer workshops and tools which support us to get through a day – without thinking we’ve failed, that we didn’t do enough, that we should have or could have … (well, you know the lyrics).
To remind us that who we are is enough. And that if we can believe that, if we can create a calmer environment inside us, this will impact on what’s outside us, too.
Find out more and book your place here.
Sample Daily Schedule
7.30am – 8.30am
Yoga or a morning walk
8.30am – 9.30am
Breakfast
9.45am – 12.15pm
Workshop with Ruby, Thubten & Rahla
12.30pm – 1.30pm
Light lunch
2pm – 4pm
Workshop with Ruby, Thubten & Rahla
4pm – 6.30pm
Unwind Time / Pool Suite / Individual Therapies / Wellbeing Activities
6.30pm – 8pm
Dinner
Find out more and book your place here.
About your teachers
Ruby Wax
From the Royal Shakespeare Company to primetime TV; from a master’s degree in mindfulness based cognitive therapy from Oxford University to best-selling author; from interviewing the president who shall not be named as part of her BBC series spanning 25 years, to script editing the whole series of Absolutely Fabulous. And from a mental health campaigner to being awarded an OBE for services to mental health.
In the field of mental health, Ruby’s brought support for mental health to a whole new audience discussing complex neurological theory in an accessible and often hilarious way but always with a serious point that we need to reframe the conversation and remove the stigma that mental health illness still carries.
Ruby helps us understand how we can take control of our overstressed and over critical minds which we can’t think of as a better foundation for a frantic world.
Gelong Thubten
Gelong Thubten is a Buddhist monk, meditation teacher and author from the UK. Gelong is a title meaning ‘senior monk’. Thubten was educated at Oxford University, and then became an actor, in London and New York. At the age of 21, tremendous amounts of stress led him to join a monastery and he was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in 1993 at Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist Monastery.
He has been teaching mindfulness meditation internationally for over 20 years, is a world pioneer in the mindfulness movement and works with major clients such as: Google, LinkedIn, Deloitte, Lloyds Bank, Deutsche Bank, Siemens, Accenture and Clifford Chance.
Rahla Xenopoulos
Rahla Xenopoulos is an author, a mother of triplets and was one of thirty-four South African women profiled in The Power Within Companion. She gives talks on mental health and empowerment, as well as hosting workshops that focus on health and personal inspiration. Rahla has written for The Sunday Times, Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Oprah Magazine and her latest book, The Season of Glass was a finalist for the Sunday Times Literary Awards.
In an ideal world Rahla would have a broad mind and a narrow waist but failing the narrow waist she’ll just settle for the broad mind.